


and the wisdom to know the difference

by Missy



Category: Evil Dead (2013), Evil Dead (Movies), Evil Dead - All Media Types
Genre: Demonic Possession, Developing Friendships, Drug Addiction, First Meetings, Gen, Past Drug Use
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-24
Updated: 2013-12-24
Packaged: 2018-01-05 21:45:08
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,880
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1098934
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Missy/pseuds/Missy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference.”  - The Serenity Prayer</p>
            </blockquote>





	and the wisdom to know the difference

**Author's Note:**

  * For [weasleytook](https://archiveofourown.org/users/weasleytook/gifts).



> written as a treat for weasleytook in Yuletide '13!

**“God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference.”** \- The serenity prayer, a common meditation at AA meetings. 

***

“Uh. Hi. My name is Mia, and it’s been ten days since my last confession.”

That got a laugh out of the tiny crowd encircling Doctor Kevin Thompson’s desk. It was a tinny echo, nervous, a sound made by people with razor-thin emotions shaved down to the last inch. But the bearded man didn’t twitch a muscle at his newest attendee’s joke - instead, he stroked his chin. “You use sarcasm to deflect anxiety. How fascinating.”

“Yeah,” a sharp voice cut in from the back of the room. “She’s a regular Richard Pryor.”

That got louder, sharper laughter out of the group, and Mia’s bows knit together as she turned toward the sound. The voice belonged to an older man with dark, wide, piercing eyes, dark but graying hair, an elongated face, a prominent chin and a coating of stubble that blanketed it. He wore a denim workshirt and a pair of khaki pants – it was the sort of look a man picked up in his teens and didn’t stop wearing until he met his maker, and it was so far out of fashion that it had nearly looped back around to be fashionable again. He watched her with a hard, steady look, casually abused the limits of his chair, looping his arm along the backrest and a foot sprawled against the top of the student’s desk. His attitude made her ears burn as she frowned right back at him, settling down at her own seat, hunching her shoulder protectively against his prying gaze.

As Doctor Thompson lead the rest of the group in a memory exercise, Mia’s eyes tracked down the length of her arm, to the stump that had too-recently been fashioned and cleaned into a proper amputation. She still didn’t remember how she’d managed to hitch her way back into town after the hellish night she’d endured – she blathered something to the doctor about a tree falling on her when they asked her what had gone wrong. The surgery was a roaring success, and she’d been out of the hospital for a month now. It had been three since she’d thrown her last bag of heroin into the wishing well outside of her family’s cabin, and half of one since she’d returned to Mich U to complete her senior year and finally get a BA in Design. As Mia had promised David all of those months ago, she was still sober – still doing the program – and still dealing with remnants of nightmares from what she’d been through. 

Automatically her good hand went to the thin strand of buckthorn draped around her neck. Fingering the bumpy ridge around the mirror pendant, she thought of her brother. The necklace was a solid memorial of his existence – and, she thought wryly, a living monument to his chintzy taste. But that was what David had been like, and she liked the necklace because it made him permanent, told her that her childhood and their shared life hadn't been some long fever dream. 

An authoritative voice cut through the memory and she was ripped back to the present.

“…Lot of good wishing and hoping is going to do!” It was that man again, and whatever Doctor Thompson had said had irritated him. The light cut across the sharp angles of his face, and Mia noticed hundreds of thin white scars half faded away upon his face. Her confused eyes tracked downward, toward his right hand.

Then she squinted and tilted her head. Maybe it was some kind of glove? 

“Mister Williams,” said Doctor Thompson, “your pent-up hostility is poisoning your ability to think clearly and logically. If you just trust in the program…”

“Buddy, there’s only one person in the world I trust, and that’s me.” He squared his shoulders and stuck out his chest, adopting the posture of a macho soldier dressing down an insubordinate. “You ain’t gonna fix what they did to me…”

“We’ve been through this. Your girlfriend…”

Ash slammed his hands down upon the desk and glared malevolently at the man. “…My GIRLFRIEND was swallowed alive by a damn demon!”

Her jaw dropped, and deep within Mia a sense of sympathy and sisterhood welled up. But the doctor glared. “A jury of your peers acquitted you and a state examiner declared you sane. I suggest you don’t push the issue with your fellow man. Now be. Seated.”

“Make me.” 

A breeze chilled the air. Mia felt goosebumps rise upon the back of her neck and turned the collar of her sweatshirt up, trying to find the origin of the icy sensation. It turned into a strong breeze so suddenly that the slamming of the classroom door made her jump. 

The lights flickered. A woman at the back of the group screamed. The classroom door started slamming itself in the artificial breeze repeatedly, until Mia clapped a hand over one of her ears and screamed at the overwhelming, inexplicable flickers of memory.

When she opened her eyes Doctor Thompson was in front of her.

Floating.

With his eyes rolled all the way back in his head.

He suffered an immediate blow to the face - delivered by the mysterious mister Williams. Mia stopped screaming, swallowed hard and watched him try to pin the former teacher to the floor with a repurposed flagpole. 

That’s when it clicked in her mind. This was no coincidence. This was a demon, just like Eric became…just like that thing in the woods had been. 

“Your soul belongs to us, Ash!” taunted the body of Doctor Thompson…in a high-pitched woman’s voice.

“Been through worse than you,” Ash spat out. “Just try and get it! Just try! I’ll show you!” The creature grinned, reached behind it…and grabbed a desk as if it were a child’s toy and leveled Ash to the floor with it.

And then Mia knew what her purpose in the room – in this life – was. 

She needed to fight.

Mia got to the floor with her fellow recovering addicts, but she was busy scrambling through the detritus the demon had left behind it. Then, in the refuse, she managed to find it: a sword-shaped letter opener, glimmering brilliantly in the flickering light.

Before she had time to consider what she was doing, Mia lunged to her feet and buried the weapon in the creature’s neck. 

Black blood pulsed out of the wound in an arterial spray, coating the floor and staining Mia’s sweater. Spinning toward her, the creature struck out blindly, and Mia ducked it and tried to find something sharp enough to kill the beast permanently. Instead, it seized her by the hair and yanked her backward into its chest.

“ANOTHER Promised One?” It slipped a finger down her throat, savoring the rabbity throb of her pulse. “and a GIRL? How delightfully novel…” Its distraction was the answer to her prayers. Her fingers scrambled backward for the letter opener and pulled it free from its anchor, then jabbed it into the creature’s jugular, coating the majority of her upper body in black blood.

That loosed its grip upon her, allowing Mia to slide away and duck beneath the overturned desk to meet Ash.

“What the hell are you doing?” he hissed. She noticed that his metallic hand was jammed beneath the corner of the desk, and that it was whirring wildly in an attempt to free him. 

“Helping you lift a desk,” she said calmly.

Ash pouted. “This ain’t your rodeo kid.”

Mia laughed. “It is now.”

In the distance, she heard the creature speaking. “Dear, you’re making me very…angry. You won’t like me when I get angry, Mia…” Its voice turned demonic, metallic. “No matter what you do we’re gonna get you.”

“NOW!” Ash shouted.

The desk flew across the room with just enough force to pinion the Deadite Thompson against the blackboard, spewing strands of blood across the floor. She saw Ash reach for something strapped to his side and recognized a cherry red chainsaw; he yanked it on, then reached for his thigh with his free hand, tossing her a shotgun.

Sawed-off. It was like he knew her.

“Doctor Thompson?” whispered a reedy, confused voice from the back of the room.

“Doctor Thompson isn’t home,” Mia said. She saw Ash cock an eyebrow at her. “And whatever this thing is, it isn’t a human being anymore.”

The creature giggled. “Who wants to be human when you can be an all-powerful God. Give in. Give in both of you and JOIN US!”

She hesitated, looked at Ash. “Ladies first,” he said.

Her look firmed, and her grip tightened around the sawed-off. She jammed it against the creature’s temple. 

Then she locked eyes with Ash.

He nodded and cocked an eyebrow.

They lunged for the kill simultaneously.

**** 

The hallway outside what had once been a peaceful NarcAnon meeting was crowded with milling, confused ex-addicts, officious and busy cops, and excited reporters. Mia ignored the hubbub, sitting on a deacon’s bench near the stairwell, waiting for the cops to interview her before they released her. She calmly polished the buckthorn necklace against her sleeve as Ash sat down beside her.

“So,” he said, “wanna tell me what the big idea was back there?”

She shrugged. “It looked like you needed help.”

“You could’ve gotten killed,” he said. “Those things don’t fool around! They’ve taken a lot of good people under my watch, and I ain’t gonna go to the pearly gates with your death on my head."

“You’ve fought those things before?” 

“Yeah,” he said shortly, evasively. “What about you? Ain’t your first time at the rodeo either, is it?”

She stared at the necklace. “So do you need help with this stuff or what? ‘Cause it kind of looked like you needed an adult back there.”

He glared at the wall. “I’ve been doing this shit since you were a drop of jizz in your daddy’s nutsack.”

“TMI,” she remarked, wrinkling her nose.

“TMI,” he growled. “You kids nowadays – you don’t fucking LISTEN before you talk!” His eyes narrowed. “It was you, wasn’t it? You set off that blood rain that happened down in the mountains a couple of months ago.”

She kept staring at the necklace. “Chainsaws, huh?”

“Yeah. Chainsaws.”

He stared at his bloody hands. Mia could feel the ooze dripping down the back of her neck, welding her to the bench. 

“Okay, it’s gonna be like this,” Ash said. “I’m gonna teach you how to shoot one-handed without killing yourself, and you’re gonna avoid reading any book older than that Fifty Shades crap.”

“Is that an order?”

“Yeah.”

She tilted her head, thought for a moment. “Teach me how to cut a guy in half and you have a deal.”

Ash raised an eyebrow. “Damn. You know how to drive a bargain.” She raised an eyebrow and waited. “All right, you’ve got a deal.”

Mia’s smile died away as a cop approached them. “All right,” he said, hands on his hips. “Who’s responsible for this?”

Each immediately pointed a finger at the other.

It was clearly the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

**Author's Note:**

> This fanfiction uses characters from **The Evil Dead Series** , all of whom are the property of **Ghosthouse/Rosebud Releasing/Universal Pictures**. No money was gained from the writing of this fanfiction and all are used under the strictures of of the Berne Convention.


End file.
